


Some Endings

by Scratch_Pad



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Angst, Comedy, F/M, Gen, History, Pastoral, Tragedy, happy endings, historical-pastoral, pastoral-comical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, unhappy endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:25:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scratch_Pad/pseuds/Scratch_Pad
Summary: Some happy, some sad, conclusions for our star-crossed detectives.I do feel a lot of the effectiveness of the will-they-won't-they in the show is that Jack and Phryne, despite all their manifold virtues, deep friendship, and sexual attraction, do have possibly insurmountable incompatibility issues, so this contains some fluff, some not-fluff, some ambiguous fluff.





	Some Endings

 

 

**She Sells Short (the Sumptuous 1930s Screwball Comedy)**

In 1929 she sold short, of course.

As soon as she had money, Phryne Fisher knew that she understood it.She had inherited a comfortable settlement, but comfort was not was she was going to settle for. To have the freedom she wanted, she needed _real_ money. She had a Collingwood girl’s eye for the main chance, an appetite for risk, and a petty thief’s instinct for getting out fast. By ’28, her inheritance had become a fortune. She had felt the shifts in the currents early in ’29, and she would come out the Crash richer far than the had gone into it.

Richer, in fact, than was quite comfortable. She was well beyond a mere millionaire now; and if she snapped up the irresistible bargains to be had on the market, in a few years she would be quite horrifyingly filthy rich.

This was the sort of money that was turned from being a freedom, to being a burden. Phryne always so enjoyed being two steps ahead, but the savour was off this time. The crash is becoming the Great Depression. Long lines of hollow-eyed people wind out of soup-kitchens and employment offices. Her triumphs were not usually quite so thrown into relief by the misery of others.

She’s always been generous with her money, when the impulse occurs to her, or someone’s sad tale catches her attention. But the idea of devoting herself charity work and philanthropy at this scale… visions of turning into her Aunt Prudence swim before her horrified imagination.

Rich men have _wives_ for this, she thinks irritably, while they go on adventuring. Dutiful, noble souls, pillars of the community devoted to public service, to always do the right thing, to sit in committees and ponder ethics and weigh consequences, and do all that paperwork…

“Jack!” she purrs, flinging open the door to him, when he arrives at her London townhouse looking nervous and neat as a pin, and he tilts his head at her warily.

 

**She Loses Everything (1930s Noir)**

Miss Phryne Fisher was all about risk, after all. She is the personification of the ‘20s, going all in, living to the hilt, no hedging on her bets. How dreary where those nervous nellies worrying about how it would all end!

She lost everything, and then some: she had leveraged, as so many had, borrowing money to pour more and more in that seemingly magical fountain of endless consumption without consequence.

They came for the plane, the car, the furs, the jewels, for Wardlow, for the very hats and lingere.

He stumblingly offers her all he has, but she brushes him off distractedly. She had bigger problems now.

Money was her freedom, her power, her independence. It is impossible for her to live without money. Absolutely impossible.

There’s nothing for her to do but turn to crime.

Nothing _wrong_ , of course, not _really_ wrong. She had learned much at her father’s knee, and the old lessons all come back. Art theft, jewel theft, blackmail for those who had it coming. Gambling dens, brothels, and after-hours speakeasies, but of the highest class. Frauds and cons, but only on those could afford to lose, and only if amusing. The Camorra make the mistake of trying for a cut of her action, and it gets a little bloody, but they were violent thugs to begin with, after all.

He closes in on her, on occasion, when she can’t resist toying with him a little too much, but he will never capture her, never.

 

**Peripatetic Domesticity as International Super-Spies (The Big Budget Adventure Serial)**

They never really went back to Melbourne. For two decades the Fisher-Robinsons were seldom same place for long, but they are generally together. There’s years of hotels and palaces, trains, boats and airplanes, camps luxurious and camps that were a fire and and a blanket under the stars.

They stick their noses anywhere there’s interesting trouble. They take on clients, paid and unpaid, and do work for Interpol, for the Intelligence Services—he was drafted back as an intelligence officer in ’39, and his Captain’s rank and air of authority does come in handy. 

But it will be in the 1950s that they have their real heyday, roaming the world in their exquisitely appointed, lushly comfortable PBY-5A Catalina.

“A flying yacht.” He deadpans, with his patented long-suffering sigh. “And this is an anniversary present for _me_ , is it?”

“It’s for _us_ , darling,” she grins. “Isn’t it _perfection?”_

 

**History Catches Up With Them**

The Spanish Civil War pulls her in, and him after her. They fight with the International Brigades, side-by-side, on reconnaissance, intelligence, guerrilla warfare, sabotage.

Tempers fray as factions multiply. The Communists will be as bad as the Fascists, given enough power, he says, it’s human nature, as likely to succeed as Free Love. If you like law and order so much, why don’t you join the Fascists, she says. They take missions further and further apart.

She is killed in ’37, in the chaos of Barcelona.

He is killed five years later, still fighting Fascists. Captain Robinson, so famous for his reckless, care-for-nothing courage.

 

**Physics Catches up With Her**

One tiny slip and that word ‘risk’ suddenly takes on a new and visceral meaning. One leg shattered, spine cracked, she will never dance the tango again, at least not conventionally.

She will still go on to adventures, and his strong arm will always be welcome at her side, provided he will never ever say “I told you so” regarding climbing roofs in heels.

 

**The Books and the Show are The Same Canon, Actually**

They still take the occasional case together, perfectly amicably.

And they both mutually, and silently, agree to pretend the whole thing never happened.

She eyes him occasionally when their paths cross with a bemused sort of nostalgia. Dear Jack! What a lovely man he was, really, and so sweet in bed, he would always be one of her favourites. But what an infatuation she had had for him! It had driven her quite demented. It had been the suspense, obviously, the delicious and highly unusual anticipation of the unobtained. Once he had _finally_ had her way with him, thankfully it had all faded quite quickly.

She can see now that beautiful as he is from some angles, from others he was perfectly ordinary. And his endless worrying and dithering, his tiresome responsibilities, and all that dreary jealousy!

She’s still terribly fond of him of course, and pleased to see that he does look content, with his snug little house and garden and wife, and two—no, a standard-issue 2.5 children, judging by Rosie’s figure.

Her arrangement with Lin was so much more _the thing_. He had grown up, the darling boy, and passed through that possessive phase. He was like her—wealthy, aristocratic, he understood how the world ought to work. They had a perfectly wonderful relationship of mutual pleasure and absolute freedom.

Imagine giving all that up for just one man, and for a desperately petit-bourgeois, rather grey, police detective! What on earth had she been thinking!

 _What a narrow escape!_ She thinks to herself, and smiles sweetly at him.

 

It’s still mildly exciting every time she comes barging into one of his cases, that wonderful creature. He’ll have more paperwork of course, and her haphazard blundering with evidence does always make the court phase dicey, but he will have some good stories for Rosie when he comes home at night.

He and Rosie are older, and wiser, and grateful for what they have; their second spring was gentler but more enduring than their first love. The children had come like a benediction and a miracle. He can’t believe how lucky he is, watching them tumbling about in the garden, and he squeezes Rosie’s hand as they sit together and chat with the neighbours on fine summer nights.

To think how close he had come to giving this up, for a mad obsession for some narcissistic, albeit delightful, socialite! Well, any man with blood in his veins must have a reaction to her, but he cringes with embarassment when he thinks of what a fool he had made of himself.

It was an old story, he supposed. “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool…” What on earth had he been thinking!

 _What a narrow escape!_ he thinks, and smiles amiably at her.

 

**They Carry On, As They Always Have**

Twenty years pass, and the sexual hum between them is fading at last. It had always been there, an almost tangible thing, even as she slept with a new young thing every week, vanished for months on end to the corners of the globe, teased and tormented him, soothed and flattered him. Jack continues his steady, quiet self, as he always has. He never remarries.

They still play draughts, even if they know each other’s every move now, the whole game predestined from the first click of a marker set down on the board.

 

**They Carry On, As They Always Have, But With Sex**

He succumbs one tempestuous night, after a case of particularly high emotions, adrelanin, and arguments. After that, they will fall into bed on occassion, when his resistance is down or her dance card has a gap.

Aside from that, not much changes.

 

**Compromises**

They married, eventually. She keeps her name, and he’s J. Fisher-Robinson, which raises eyebrows, but he doesn’t mind that. He finds it rather amusing, and a marriage between an aristocrat and a working-class policeman is already odd enough.

When the police force is cut by twenty percent in 1933, he resigns, to save the job of a man who needs it. No one had quite known how to cope with a humble DI married to a scandalous millionaire anyways. He will return to force a few years later, as consulting Inspector-General. He’s uncomfortable with his _society connections_ having brought this about, but he can do a lot more good in that position, and it gives them freedom and scope to work together.

They adopt. One runs into a lot of kids getting a rough start, in their line of work. She takes care of the money, he does the children. She drags him out dancing; he cajoles her into camping.

She’s surprised to find no compromises are necessary with regards to his family. She adores his sisters, and there will be many times through the decades she thinks herself as lucky to have married into his family as to him.

She flies off, every once in a while, adventuring; he tells the press he’s immensely proud of his accomplished wife. Often, but not always, he comes along.

They change each other, in all those ways that marriages will do.

 

**Compromises, Alternate**

No marriage, no children. He doesn’t ask, she doesn’t offer.

They are who they are, after all. They aren’t kids anymore, and they’ve gone through enough in their lives that they know how how they must live to be happy, or at least, to be themselves. He’s no fit husband for any woman, and she’s certain never going to be anyone’s wife. They will find a way instead to share a border, lives overlapping, but not intertwining.

It’s clandestine, careful, quiet, because it has to be, for him. She is a millionaire aristocrat and can do as she pleases, but he isn’t, and can’t. But many of his colleagues have mistresses, after all, and so long as they are very discrete and don’t annoy the top brass, there should be no scandal, and his job will be safe. In ten years she’s been in his house a total of three times. He’s been in hers more often than they can count; but her neighbours are not so conservative, or so nosy, and it’s easier to slip out unobserved through her large gardens in the grey dawn light.

If he seeks comfort elsewhere during her long absences, as she does, she doesn’t ask. If she sometimes thinks it might be nice to wake up with him still in her bed, to have a more ordinary, public partnership, she doesn’t offer. If he has troubles with those littlenesses of bourgeois life, money, family, health, she doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t offer.

He will always have that wistful sadness that is so attractive to her; she will always have that invulnerable self-sufficiency.

She keeps saying she can’t promise forever, but then she’s been saying it for twenty years.

 

**Compromises, Unexpected**

He discovers that so long as she is completely discrete and ideally out of town, he doesn’t mind her adventuring with other men, as it seems so important to her. He will even join in some of her unusual amorous escapes, provided they follow his precautions and no one ever, ever finds out.

She discovers that while she doesn’t _do_ children, her own are obviously and markedly superior to _ordinary_ children and quite a different matter, especially as Jack and nannies deal with the dull years, and boarding schools with the irritating ones.

They are quite ridiculously happy, in an aristocratic sort of way.

 

**She Ruins Him**

It was either going to be the scandal of their _cohabitation_ , or the scandal of her illegal procurement of evidence, but it was inevitable. In the end, of course, it was both. He was honestly surprised he had survived three years; and more surprised that there was still a torrid affair for him to lose his job over.

The defence can’t believe their luck. The case unravels in court, and Jack sits stoically in the dock as the packed room titters at every insinuating revelation _._ Every previous case of his, of _theirs,_ is raked over, by the newspapers, scandal sheets, and by his superiors who had once respected him. His resignation is demanded the next day.

It’s 1933, and a third of the men in the country are out of work. He is unemployed and disgraced in the middle of the Great Depression.

Phryne is uncharacteristically quiet as he stares silently into his whiskey glass. “I suppose…” she trails a hand over the side of the chaise, not looking at him, smiling slightly. “Jack. I…look. You were right. This is getting silly…don’t you think it’s time we…you know.” He has hardly ever seen her look so awkward. She rolls her eyes. “Dammit, Jack! Do you want me to get down on one knee?”

“Is this my bad-conduct prize?” He says, trying for humour, and failing. He can see her eyes widen in shock.

He stands up abruptly. “I need to get home.”

“Jack! But…this is your home, you know that! I thought we were over this.”

It seemed pointless to him to make a reply to _this_ , their old argument. He was here as her guest, her lover for some uncertain amount of time. Of course it wasn’t his home. None of this was his, he had no right to this comfort and safety, to this money, to Mr. Butler appearing, kindly but always disconcerting, at his elbow. No promises, no commitments, no for richer or poorer: that had been the arrangement.

And now he had as good as entrapped her into marriage, something she had always been adamant would be tantamount to her destruction. Or perhaps he could be one of her _projects_ , a sad case to take in. Either way she would be tied to him now by iron chains of guilt, that he well knew were heavier far than any bond of marriage. He could bear anything but her resentment, to have her direct the same weary looks at him that Rosie had done.

She gives him a day to brood and get over his melodrama. It was a mistake. By the time she realises the situation is serious, he has vanished. He leaves a note:

_I will be all right. No regrets. Be happy. Please, don’t come after me._

It takes weeks of detecting to trace him to a merchant ship bound for the Americas, signed on as a guard. She lost his track in Canada, and he disappears into the millions on that great continent.

She never does find him.

She certainly doesn’t stop adventuring, and sleeps with all the men she pleases; but she stays well away from the sensitive ones, the good ones.

 

**He Ruins Her**

To be fair, he never asked for any of it.

She has to find all of it out by detection: the estrangement from half his family, the money troubles and the precarity of his job. Anyhow she’s impatient with how much sneaking around they need to do, and on an impulsive mad weekend away, she arranges everything.

In the beginning, it’s fine, lovely even. But he can’t, not quite, extinguish the spark of hope that lights in his eye when they realise she’s pregnant (nothing is foolproof, after all). He immediately tries to cover up; of course it was her decision, he wanted only her happiness. But she had seen it.

The thousand petty humiliations of being _a wife_ , a _mother_ , grate incessantly on her. The visceral, biological tug of the infant drives her mad, no matter how many nannies and nurses she has interposed between them. She is no longer just herself, she is _his_ , _its_ , entangled in a drowning web of emotions and relations.

 _I’m fine darling,_ she simpers at him, tightly, over breakfast.

 

**They Love Each Other, and They Let Each Other Go (But They’ll Always Have Paris)**

She’s been away from Melbourne for nearly two decades.

She always knew he would age well, and she recognises that tall straight back immediately. His bearing would be enviable on a man half his age. More surprising is hearing him laugh, and when he turns she sees he must laugh often, if the crinkles around his eyes are anything to go by. He still has all that quiet dignity she had fallen in love with years ago, but he looks easier in himself. He looks happy.

Her news clipping service had been faithfully keeping her up to date on him over the years, and her heart always lurched a little when an article turns up, neatly pasted into her weekly review. In 1933 there was even a grainy photograph, _DCI J. Robinson, Inspector-General, Committee on Police Corruption_ ; there were new grim lines around his mouth, and she worried about him, facing that alone. His resignation from Interpol as the Nazis siezed control had made even the British papers, and she was in her suite at the Drake Hotel when she read “Melbourne: The Way Forward for Policing?” in the New York Times, absurdly proud tears in her eyes.

He had had tears in his eyes when he had told her that he could not be with her as she wanted: without marriage. He could not sacrifice his reputation, his career, his own peace of mind. She had railed at him, disbelieving: hadn’t she given up so much for him? Hadn’t she loved him, come back to him, confined herself to only him? He was giving up _them_ , for _respectability?_ He had asked again, and she had laughed, and he had walked away.

She understood now. It was his nature to be part of society, but to bend it with his steady patience. All his dedication and goodness belonged not to her, or even to him, but to his community, to his city.

 _I plan to make this city less dangerous, Miss Fisher:_ almost the first words he ever spoke to her.

His children are youngsters still, so beautiful she can hardly bear to look at them. His wife…

She had always assumed he would come back to her, and she had stared uncomprehending at that telegram from Mac: DONT KILL ME STOP INTROD FRIEND TO JACK STOP BRACE YOURSELF FOR THE HAPPY NEWS. She had telegraphed back, GOOD FOR HIM QUERY. And Mac had replied, YES.

She expects to feel more jealous—an emotion she had only ever experienced for him. She’s not particularly beautiful, she catches herself thinking critically, and her figure had gone with childbearing. She has a serious, intelligent face…too serious, surely? Then she sees Jack lean down to whisper something in her ear; she smirks and elbows him in the ribs, and he raises a mock-indignant eyebrow at her—just as he used to do, to her.

Ironic, she thinks, smiling to herself. He, the great monogamist, had loved again, while it seemed that she, worlds foremost proponent of Free Love, would only ever have truly loved one man in her life.

 

She looks to him as beautiful as ever—more beautiful, in ways, as the years have carved her character into her face, and every line is elegant and true. She still seems to carry her own warm, bright light around her, magnetising every eye in the room.

He owed her everything. She had made him braver, stronger, crashed through the shell that was ossifying around him. Leaving her had been the hardest thing he had ever done, almost as hard as letting himself go to her in the first place.

He had been happy, deliriously so, but he had been feeling less and less _himself_. Trying to keep up with her, trying to not care about his reputation, trying to live for the moment, trying to replace his own ideals with hers. Even as he did so, he could see her trying to compact herself for him, censor herself, to walk beside him when she should be flying.

They had reached for each other across that abyss, and their hands had grasped; but they could not step across it, not without falling. There was nothing to do but to let each other go, so that they could tread their own diverging paths.

His daughter keeps him abreast of her exploits, and newspaper clippings adorn her bedroom. The aviation records, the Spanish Civil War, the Second War—she ought to have had an OBE for her Intelligence work, had she not been so very _scandalous_. Jack’s daughter giggles, and he mock-scowls at her, when she shows him the clippings about the rodeo riders, Arab sheiks, Himalayan mountaineers…(where does she even _find_ those articles!?). She’ll be old enough for those flying lessons, soon.

He watches a man half her age stumble over his feet as Phryne turns that ageless, dazzling smile on him. _Oh go on, mate,_ he smiles to himself. _You never know what might come of it._

She is indomitable, free, completely herself, the famous Miss Phryne Fisher.

 

It’s her that gets up the courage to ask for a dance, of course it is. “Jack Robinson,” she says, and he turns slowly. “Perhaps a waltz?”

“Miss Fisher.” That old familiar half-smile is on his face. 

And he takes her up, with his undiminished serious grace, slow and close. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Just a few notes—
> 
> \- The first scenario was inspired by the Gershwin song, “I Can’t Get Started With You” (“In 1929 I sold short”), which is pure Phryne when sung by Ella Fitzgerald.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HzofomuZtI
> 
> -The 20% cut to all public services during Great Depression did happen, I'm assuming that included police
> 
> -The Catalina Flying Yacht, perfect vehicle for Phryne and Jack 1950s adventures— http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/04/24/all-aboard-the-flying-yacht-circa-1950/  In this scenario they have to have kids, a dog, a comedy sidekick, and some good recurring villains. I have it all planned out. 1950s TV producers, call me.
> 
> -edited to add a forgotten note! "Is this my bad-conduct prize" in "She Ruins Him" is a half-quote from Dorothy Sayers Strong Poison, where Harriet Vane calls her murdered lover's marriage offer after agreeing to live with him a 'bad-conduct prize'


End file.
